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A Cross-Cultural Examination of Children's Understanding of “The Enemy”
Abstract
Despite the apparent ease and regularity with which adults label individuals and groups as "the enemy," little is known regarding how children understand this concept. The current qualitative study examined the concept of enemy as understood by 105 3- to 12-yr.-old children from two sides of an international conflict--Yugoslavia and the United States. This article provides an analysis of the children's answers during a structured interview regarding their understanding of enemies, specifically the perceptions of children in a war zone and the perceptions of children living in relative safety. Children of all ages could discuss the concept of enemy. They described both interpersonal and group conflict. A common theme in both Yugoslavian and U.S. children's descriptions was that an enemy is someone who is bad or does bad things. The children recognized the importance of at least two "sides" and discussed reciprocal or mutual feelings. In general, the children showed great optimism that one's enemies can become one's friends. These findings are interpreted in terms of developmental issues and sociopolitical context.
... Children are expected to draw what they know, feel, and care about (Ahmad, 2018;Barraza, 1999;Brooks, 2005;Cherney et al., 2006;Myers-Bowman et al., 2003;Shaban & Al-Awidi, 2013;Soundy, 2012), and children in this study drew what they recalled -what had the largest impact on their school experience. The most common components in their drawings were people and the school environment. ...
... Research shows that children's drawings are affected by culture; what they know and observe is represented in their drawings (Ahmad, 2018;Jolley, 2010;Myers-Bowman et al., 2003;Shaban & Al-Awidi, 2013). Therefore, it was remarkable that there were no representations of fathers in the drawings; one child did verbally express that she liked when her father comes to school to pick her up, but she did not represent him in the drawing. ...
This research analyzes the content of preschool children’s drawings as they reflect on aspects of their preschool environment that they missed most during COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures in Saudi Arabia. Children participated in collaboration with their mothers, who directed and collected their drawings. The participants were limited to a group of 41 children between 3–7 years old. The results revealed that most of their drawings were of people, followed by the school environment; the playground was the most prominent area drawn representing the physical environment. Other categories, from the most to the least drawn, include nature, daily scheduled activities, writing activities, food items, and methods of transportation. Through drawings, children showed their most important needs in the preschool environment, which provides some insight into what educators should plan for when children to return to school.
... We all understand that peace is the best environment for children to grow up in, but many people deal with war experiences and consequences. There are relatively few scientific articles on these topics related to the war experiences of preschool age children [1,2,10,13,14]. ...
Lithuanian society actively supports Ukraine and is very close to the threat of extended war. How to communicate with preschool children about cruel war events is a problematic question for many parents and educators. Purpose - to study the attitude of parents to communicate with children about the war, to determine the ways of thinking and perception of military events by children through drawings. Materials and methods. The study was conducted in 5 kindergartens in Vilnius with the participation of 113 parents of 36 children. Results. Results revealed that 54.9% parents noted that they are talking about the war with their preschool-age child. 31.8% parents gave permission to speak and draw with their children about the war. The average age of children was 5.3±0.7 years. 72.2% of parents who permitted to talk about the war in Ukraine with their children indicated that they speak to their children about the war, and only 46.7% of parents who not gave permission indicated that they speak to their children about the war (p=0.006). Data showed that even children not directly impacted by war violence often are aware of current war events. Children’s drawings demonstrated a concrete understanding of war events and emphasized war’s negative emotions and destructive consequences. The predominant theme of the drawings were weapons, war events, falling bombs, destroyed houses, dying people, soldiers, and frightened faces. Conclusions. The study revealed that only half of the parents talked to their children about the war in Ukraine. Analysis of the form and content of the drawings show that the experienced war events left a robust impression on the children. It is essential to know the feelings and experiences of preschool children, to react appropriately according to their age and respond to their needs. It is necessary to talk to children about the war, trying to understand their worldviews, imaginations, and fears, because war experiences at an early age are a severe factor for the child’s further development. No conflict of interests was declared by the authors.
... According to Holt, differences in values and norms among individuals were found to play an important role in the formation of an enemy on the national level but not on the personal level. Nevertheless, in the absence of a "real" enemy, children already at young ages (i.e., 4 to 6 years) develop an understanding of an enemy (Hesse & Poklemba, 1989;Hesse & Mack, 1991;Myers-Bowman, Walker, & Myers-Walls, 2003;Oppenheimer, 2005). Of course, it would be of interest to know whether such an understanding is paralleled by the emergence of enemy images and what they depict. ...
Enemies and enemy images are thought to be prerequisites in preparedness for war (i.e., to fight and kill). In spite of this knowledge, very little information is available about children’s understanding of enemies and the emergence and nature of enemy images. In part this is due to the absence of theoretical insights into the developmental course for the understanding of enemies and the emergence of enemy images. The purpose of this article is to present a theoretical model embedding the development of the understanding of enemy and the emergence of enemy images in social contexts, such as the family, the peer group, and society. On the basis of this model, future research questions dealing with the development, emergence, and maintenance of enemy images can be formulated.
War and terrorism enter the lives of young children all too often. Young children can be affected by direct exposure to the violence, displacement, family disruption related to deployment, economic expenditures supporting political violence, media exposure, fear and anxiety related to possible attacks, and distrust and dehumanization of “the other” related to enemy images.
A comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing research area of peace psychology. Both a topic in its own right and studied within courses on peace studies, conflict studies and subsidiaries of psychology, international relations and politics, peace psychology is a practically and theoretically important area. This textbook covers the whole research literature focusing on research since the end of the cold war but also incorporating aspects of earlier literature which retain contemporary relevance. The content includes an introductory chapter outlining the growth of the field and continues to cover interdisciplinary practice (international relations, education, feminist studies and ethics), primary psychological topics (development, social psychology, psychodynamics and cognition), core topics from peace studies (conflict resolution, crisis management, non-violence, peacemaking and peacebuilding, specific locations such as the middle East and sustainable development) and terrorism (threats and victims). This is a unique textbook that will appeal to students and practitioners alike.
In order for children and adults to achieve peace, theories suggest that an understanding of peace is required. Few efforts have been made by previous researchers to trace the developmental process and describe the unfolding of that understanding. This qualitative study of 58 children ages 3 to 12 used drawings and semistructured interviews to identify themes in children's descriptions of peace. Those themes and understandings were then grouped into six levels that were interpreted in light of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of development and its later interpretations. The levels are Preunderstanding, My Peace and Quiet, Sharing Peace with Friends, Making Peace with Friends, Peace in my Communities, and World Peace. Some developmental changes in children's thinking appeared to be stagelike, others showed gradual development, and still other components appeared to be idiosyncratic.
This study examined social perceptions among 191 Arab and Jewish children who live in mixed neighborhoods in Israel. Human Figure Drawing assessment was used to examine the children's social perceptions. The drawings that the Jewish Israeli children created portrayed Arabs as the enemy, whereas the Arab Israeli children expressed a more positive perception of Jews. The Arab children's perceptions of the Arab social image were found to be less positive than the Jewish children's perceptions of the Jewish social image. Examples of the children's drawings and questionnaire responses about their drawings are presented.
This study explored what Taiwanese parents would educate their children about peace and what children retained from parental teaching, as well as children's reported communication with parents about peace. In-depth interviews were conducted with 60 parents and one of their children. Based on the perceptions of children, the most influential learning children received from their parents in peace education is the aspect of negative descriptions of peace (what peace is not). Unique findings suggest that Taiwanese parenting about peace focuses more on teaching children personal cultivation and interpersonal harmony than introducing the ideas of international collaboration or universal rights. The findings suggest that the specific macrosystem of Taiwan may influence how parents educate their children about peace. One important implication for family practitioners is the necessity to take into account the traditional cultural values particular to the group they work with and to connect those to peace education when designing programs.
This exploratory study described Taiwanese children's perceptions of peace and what they think children can do to make peace. In-depth interviews were conducted with 60 Taiwanese children ages 4 to 18 years. The most predominant themes for the perceptions of peace were what peace is not, prosocial behaviors, positive emotions, and positive evaluations of peace. Approximately half of the children (48%) provided specific strategies for making peace. The suggested strategies generally were based on the child's immediate environment, such as "don't fight" "don't argue," and specific prosocial behaviors. 52% of children either said, "I don't know" when asked what children can do to make peace, or did not feel empowered to make peace. The initial findings were interpreted in terms of sociocultural issues, such as cultural heritage and upbringing, as well as within a political context.
Previous studies reported that children’s first coherent utterances about peace and war were evident between the ages of 6 and 8, where verbalization of war preceded verbalization of peace. In the following years, children develop fairly well-defined ideas. This conceptual development was assumed to be part of and to reflect children’s development of interpersonal understanding. In a longitudinal study, 44 Dutch children between the ages of 6 and 10 (i.e., three repeated measures through age ranges of 6.0 to 7.11, 7.0 to 8.11, and 8.0 to 9.11) were interviewed about conceptions of peace, war, and strategies to attain peace. The longitudinal data were consistent with earlier results that the concept of war developed prior to the concept of peace. Concrete aspects such as friendships, absence of quarrels, and absence of wars dominated images of peace, whereas weapons and soldiers, war activities, and consequences of war dominated images of war. A more abstract, norm-related level of reasoning was not evident.
Social identity is thought to be the means through which individuals understand themselves in their social context. Understanding the processes of identity formation in the context of intergroup conflict is particularly important, since social identity is critical to understanding how people act. Social identity, though, has been a difficult process to study since it is a purely internal construct. In this study, we argue that free- form drawings provide the greatest insight into how people see themselves in their social context. Data were gathered from Arab subjects in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Among the important findings is that subjects exposed to the greatest conflict tend to organize their identities in ways that include their enemy as well as themselves. This necessarily creates a situation where the conflict becomes self- perpetuating.
Attention has been recently directed towards fathoming young people's responses to the nuclear threat, but the broader question of how they acquire and form attitudes to peace and war in general has been neglected. Based mainly on studies published in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is hypothesized that children's conceptions of, and attitudes towards, war and peace vary with age, gender, sources of information and exposure to media violence, perceived threats to Australian security and type of school attended. The hypotheses are tested using data obtained from a questionnaire and interview survey of 608 students aged 4-16 years in 10 government and non-government schools in NSW, Australia. By and large, the findings parallel those of previous studies on the age factor, though the assertions that children know more about war than peace and that older children are more likely to believe in innate human aggression are not confirmed. Some interesting differences emerge, however, with respect to the gender, school type, security and media exposure factors. Gender differences are unequivocally significant, as is type of school attended. Boys' attitudes are more militaristic, whilst girls' attitudes are more pacific, and acceptance of war is greater among children attending single-sex boys' and Private Protestant schools. But there are no strong connections between information sources or consumption of violent TV programmes and attitudes. The degree of security children feel is related to attitudes to war and some attention is given to discussing the paradox of children being generally threatened by war and non-accepting of it, yet supporting the use of violent defence. In this context, it is suggested that further research be conducted on children's ideas about just war. Additionally, it is suggested that more work be done on the dynamics by which school ethos influences attitudes, on media violence and attitudes and on the knowledge of very young children about peace and war.
This article explores the importance of historical sociocultural changes in the children's ethnic and national socialization processes, using the example of Croatian (and some Bosnian) children in the 1990s whose development has been deranged by a war in which ethnic belonging has played a major role. In their life history essays, denotation of `the Enemy' ranges from the imposition of taboos and the compensational personification of war as `hostile history' to the direct naming of the actual human enemy by using the shared ethnic markers that point to the politicized collective identities.
Children (aged 8 and 11 yrs) were studied as evaluators of peer group entry and limited resources. They evaluated two focal peers portrayed as either best friends, acquaintances, or enemies, in terms of attributions of intentions and behavior responses. Results indicated that children's evaluations were influenced by the social relationship between peers (best friends and acquaintances, positive; enemies, negative). Older children evaluated peers more positively than did younger children for limited resources conflicts. Further, all children evaluated the focal peer's intentions during peer entry more negatively than intentions during limited resources and evaluated peer behavior responses during limited resources more positively than behavior responses during peer entry. Findings are discussed in terms of previous research on social perception and implications for future research investigating the social contexts that influence children's evaluations of peers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Discusses enemy images, which have played an important role in stimulating and perpetuating the nuclear arms race, focusing on aspects of the psychology of US images of the USSR. Psychologists can apply methods and theories to investigating, and perhaps ameliorating, the causes and effects of the exaggerated enemy images of another nation that the people of one nation may hold. A brief history of the topic in psychology is presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The present study examined influences on girls' evaluations of relational aggression situations. Second-, third-, fifth-, and sixth-grade girls evaluated four relational aggression conflict scenarios in terms of attributions of aggressor's intentions, evaluator's behavioral response, evaluator's affective state, and how likely the situation was to actually occur. Girls evaluated intentions of a best friend more positively, reported being more mad at an enemy, and perceived conflict to be more likely to occur with an enemy than a best friend. Aggressor intentions in direct conflict scenarios (aggressor said something mean to evaluator) were perceived as more negative than aggressor intentions in indirect conflict scenarios (aggressor said something mean about evaluator to another peer). Younger girls reported intentions of their enemy as being more positive than did older girls. Further, older girls reported intentions of their best friend as being more positive than intentions of their enemy. Older girls also were more accurate in conceptualizing variations in the conflict setting (direct, indirect) and responding in a context-consistent manner. Findings are discussed in terms of the social-relational and social-situational processes that influence children's evaluations of relational aggression and how the current study extends previous research on relational aggression. Aggr. Behav. 26:179–191, 2000. © 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
The present study examined children's evaluations of potentially conflictual situations between peers. Eight- and 11-year-olds evaluated two hypothetical target children in three scenarios which differed as to the intent of a provocative act (Accidental, Ambiguous, Hostile). In addition to grade and sex, relationship between targets was manipulated as a between-subjects variable with targets portrayed as either Best Friends Acquaintances, or Enemies. Children evaluated targets in terms of attributions of intentions, behavior response, affective state of targets, and mutual liking between targets. Results indicated that aggressor's intentions and victim's behavior response were evaluated as positive for the Accidental scenario and as negative for the Hostile scenario regardless of target relationship. When aggressor's intentions were unclear (e.g., Ambiguous), interactions between Best Friends and interactions between Acquaintances were evaluated as positive while interactions between Enemies were perceived as negative. Further, while all children predicted a negative response by the victim during the Hostile situation, younger children predicted the victim's response would be less negative than did older children. Children reported Best Friends and Acquaintances as liking each other more before the provocation situation started than after it occurred while liking between Enemies remained unchanged, thus indicating a belief that provocations may hurt a positive or neutral relationship. Targets were perceived to be in negative affective states during the Accidental and Ambiguous scenarios and the aggressor was perceived to be in a neutral affective state during the Hostile scenario. Results are discussed in terms of previous research on response to provocation and implications for research on children's peer conflicts. Aggr. Behav. 23:417–431, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Second-, third-, fifth-, and sixth- grade children evaluated two hypothetical target peers in three provocation scenarios which differed as to the intent of a provocative act (Ambiguous, Accidental, Hostile). In addition to age and gender, evaluator-victim relationship was manipulated with children portrayed as being in a best friend, an acquaintance, or an enemy relationship with the victim, while the agent of the provocation was an unfamiliar peer. Evaluations were assessed in terms of attributions of aggressor's intentions, behavior response of the victim, evaluator's liking for victim, and evaluator's affect. Results indicated that older children evaluated aggressor's intentions and victim's behavior response more negatively than did younger children. Further, attributions of aggressor's intent significantly predicted the victim's subsequent behavioral response. Evaluator's affect was reported to be more negative when evaluating hostile provocation compared to accidental or ambiguous provocation and evaluators in acquaintance and enemy relationships with the victim reported liking the victim more after the provocation than before it occurred. Results are discussed in terms of the social relational and social situational influences on children's evaluations of peer interactions and the need to integrate these contextual factors in children's person perception research.
In a study of enemy images, 57 introductory psychology students were individually interviewed and tested in the winter of 1985–1986. For most respondents, a personal enemy was someone who does or intends harm to you or betrays you, while incompatible religious or political views do not hinder friendship. In contrast, other countries were considered enemies of the United States on grounds of opposing values or policies as often as because of perceived threat or danger from them. Over 80% of respondents thought the Soviet Union can harm us and is our enemy, but only 16% believed it intends us harm. Stereotypy of enemy image was defined as the proportion of extreme enemy adjectives attributed to the people of a nation. Only 7% of respondents used a majority of their 5 choices from a list of 20 adjectives to attribute stereotyped enemy characteristics to “the Russians,” whereas stereotypy of enemy image for “Nicaraguans” was significantly greater. Results were interpreted as indicating a change in the meaning of the term enemy with the emergence of a generation having no personal experience of conventional wars.